On 10/19/2014 8:12 AM, Jason Resch wrote:
I don't recall Bruno ever csaying if you don't believe in something then you
believe in it.
What he's said is that atheists defend/support/reinforce the same idea/conception of god
that the literalist or fundamentalist abrahamic religions use.
Atheists can't say there is no God without defining what they mean by God,
Yeah, they tend to be rational like that.
and invariably they choose some variant of an omniscient omnipotent creator who answers
prayers and judges us, rather than any of the myriad of other conceptions of god.
Maybe it's because they speak the same language and that's what "theism" means.
In this way, atheists pretend there is only one acceptable definition and will usually
fight to say that it is only definition, or the one everyone means, or believe the one
all believers believe in.
That's a perfect case of defending the idea of what God is or can be, even if it is only
to then attack the idea. Honest theistic reasoning would use logic to say, "okay
perhaps God cannot be this, but we have not ruled out these other possibilities which
are as far as we know not inconsistent",
Other possibilities for *what*? What is the thing? What are its essential properties?
What is its definition? They start with a word, a few attributes, and an emotional
attitude and they seek a definition they can attach them to. Which would be OK, except
they insist that the word "God", which already has millenia of baggage, must apply.
That's my complaint with Bruno. He explicitly renounces all that baggage, but he still
wants to use the word "God".
rather than "we have ruled out this definition of god, and it is the only definition,
therefore there is no god"
Yes, that's exactly the approach taken by theologians. First they take a word "God" and
then they see if they can give it some meaning that makes them feel good. But notice that
they capitalize it already, implying it is a person. "Honest theistic reasoning" is like
"faith based evidence".
Brent
The political discourse matters, and explains a good deal. But
there's something beneath it, something we don't want to look in
the face: namely, that in India, as elsewhere in our darkening
world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion
intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating
around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable
language of "respect". What is there to respect in any of this,
or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around
the world in religion's dreaded name? How well, with what fatal
results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill
for them! And when we've done it often enough, the deadening of
affect that results makes it easier to do it again. So India's
problem turns out to be the world's problem. What happened in
India has happened in God's name. The problem's name is God.
--- Salman Rushdie 2002
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